On nicknames...or the Wedding of Big Hole Mary

elder999

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When my wife worked for the Forest Service, among the many people she met was a girl close to her age. Since girls who jumped out of helicopters to fight fires were something of a rarity, they got rather close. Mary is nice, friendly and somewhat large, in the manner of girls born and raised in Montana. My wife liked her, and was shocked one day when someone saw her talking to the girl and later said, “I see you’ve met Big Hole Mary.”

Now, Rita has always traveled in ready-to-go circles and has never been a stranger to shock humor or nicknames, but she was still taken aback. “I couldn’t understand why people would have such a mean, personal nickname for her, and I thought about talking to her and asking if she knew,” Rita recalled .

This came up because Big Hole Mary had gotten married. We missed the wedding, but after the ceremony she had apparently taken her newly betrothed around to meet the locals, or whatever locals were hanging out, so she had, in effect, taken her new husband to meet the guys who had given her the nickname “Big Hole Mary.”

“It was kind of weird," said a friend of ours who was there, “the guy didn’t look real thrilled about it, and all us dogs sniffed at him for a minute, and could tell he didn’t think much of her friends, so no one cut him any slack.”

We realized as we thought about it that most people, including very probably, the new husband, don’t know many people with nicknames. Binky and Bunny don’t count.

Nicknames, like tattoos, used to be mostly associated with bikers and felons. In the cultural anthropology of the genre, they have been used to distinguish, impugn or just confuse, and the great nicknames carry with them an element of dark, insider humor. Oddly, as we considered it, nearly everyone we know has a nickname, or several.

Sometimes, they’re obvious. Chicken Neck, for instance, or Dog man. Sometimes, to be truthful, they are more alias than nickname. On our friend Virgil’s birth certificate it says something else, but for business reasons years agi he wanted a moniker that sounded as hillbilly as possible. It was just happenstance that he is also a Virgo. A well known local artist who paints largely native American themes used “Charles bear” as his nom de plume……what a poser! I first met Charles in the company of a singer/musician named Norton Buffalo, and neither of them seemed to think their pairing was as humorous as I did.

In some dojo, particularly in the New York area, it’s the practice for some people to have rather ridiculous budo names stitched on their dogi, like “Rubberband man,” "Hammerfist," or …well, you get the idea….I once had such a nickname for my rather long legs, though I didn't have it embroidered on my gi.....

It’s also not uncommon for people to get nicknames from co-workers. I’ve found that cops usually call each other little-boy shortened versions of their names, “Bobby,” “Billy,” Eddie,” and “Robby” come to mind immediately. When I was working on …er…device disassembly, people called me “Fearless,” and “Ice,” because of my apparent cool..I quickly disabused them of that notion by commenting that “Fearless” was a lot more like “****less.” That name stuck, dammit.
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That handle up there in the corner of this post is a longstanding joke. I participate in Native American ceremonies, and a gentleman who passed away just last year made the comment that I was some sort of “junior elder.” I replied that I had about 1,000 years to go before I was worthy of being called an elder, so I’ve got 999 (now, more like 990, now)to go…..

The best nicknames are the ones that cause you to stop and think for a while., The ones that require you to know someone well enough to fully get the joke. A guy named Ron, whom we all called Wahoo, moved to Alaska and returned married to a rather large Inuit woman who called him Blaze-O. “That’s my name up there,” he grinned. Why? we asked, wondering if they thought he was hot in bed, quick to anger or what. “Because when I got married my buddies didn’t think it was right that I was six inches shorter than my bride, so they had me stand on a case of firestarter called Blaze-O.”

Which brings us back to Big Hole Mary, who came to town and got married and all the guys said she looked good and seemed real happy. Then she and her husband moved back to the part of Montana where she was from. A few weeks after meeting her, my wife asked her where that was, and Mary said just outside of a town called Wisdom.

“Where’s that?” Rita had asked.

“Over in the Big Hole Valley.” came the reply.

What's your nickname, and how'd ya get it?
 
nifty stories. cool thread.

so there's a series of fantasy novels published in middle of the second half of the 20th century. these b-grade novels, by fritz lieber, chronicle the adventures of fafhrd and the gray mouser.

fafhrd is a ginormous barbarian from the tundra. gray mouser is a small, urbane thief from the city. they go around whupping up on people, having adventures and getting into and out of trouble. a great deal of trouble is gone to to expound on their inseperableness and absolute loyalty to one another.

so, i'm 5'9" in my good boots and grew up in the city. went to college in eugene where i met my best friend and brother in arms. said brother is 6'7" and grew up in the woods in northeastern washington.

we were both geeks. we both read fantasy and play d&d. we're both martial artists. we tend to get into and out of far more trouble when together than when kept separate by well-meaning friends. one dorm-mate made the connection at lunch early our freshman year we use the monickers with one another to this day.

others usually only call the pair of us by that nickname, but to the individual by his given name.
 
Some of my friends call me "Pam-a-lam* (because of the song Black Betty *Bam-a-lam*) my brother-in-law is the one who started it all and it kind of spread from there..
 
My nickname became Stay Puff from the movie GhostBusters, for I'm like the staypuff from that movie soft and cuddly but big enough to hurt you. Or atleast my friends thought so.
Terry
 
My friend luke and i have known each other as lad since we were kids. I'm struggling to remember why but it was something we started calling each other when we first met and it just stuck.
Thinking about it, something else that we started doing when we were kids was having film style playfights when we first meet each other. Massively exaggerated blows and armbreaks etc accompanied with sound effects. I'm 28 now but we still greet each other exactly the same way as when we were teenagers which probably looks ridiculous but hey, who cares!
 
When I was in the Air Force my first Shift Sargeant called me Wild Bill because of my aggresive attitude about law enforcement. Sometimes it was used mockingly because of my lack of partying and dull lifesyle. My room mate started calling me Crazy Eyes. He said that whenever I get mad I get a crazy look in my eyes. A few close friends in my squadren called me Billy Bob. I don't know why.
 
Slippery Pete....hmmm...one of the assistant instructors when i first started taekwondo was obsessed with lame pirate jokes...it was a long-standing joke to make lame pirate sounds whenever you were around this instructor...so when i first came they decided i needed a nickname...well, he being of high rank decided i should be named Slippery Pete...and it stuck so its fun
 
When I was in university, there were a number of Dans. Apparently, my circle of friends needed to come up with a way to identify the individual Dans in conversation. We had "Neighbour Dan", "Crabby Dan", and me, "Weird Dan". My understanding is that I was the weirdest Dan that they'd ever met....some people are just misunderstood.

There was also Coupon Dan. He didn't really care for that moniker, so we started calling him "the Dan formerly known as Coupon Dan". He didn't care for that one either. It proved to be too much work to change it yet again, so that one stuck.

My buddy Deuce (who is a less active member here) got the name because in university, he wasn't particularly, ummmm.... choosy. To begin with, he hated it. But, over time, he became more comfortable with it - now it's a rarity that anyone actually knows his real name. LOL!
 
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